Challenges of teaching adults To revise but not to repeat To recycle but not to get bored To teach but not to preach To rely on adult experience and brain development To simulate relevant communication &professional contexts To boost ‘learning to learn’ but to provide necessary guidance and support

Approach to teaching Topic knowledge can not compensate for vocabulary knowledge Knowing the most important vocabulary – syllabus based on Oxford 3000™ and BNC Knowing vocabulary makes listening and reading more rewarding More than just knowing words

Approach to teaching Grammar — explicit teaching of rules yields better results • than implicit teaching (Norris & Ortega, 2000) • for both simple and complex forms (Spada and Tomita, 2010) • combined with communicative practice, leads to unconscious knowledge of the grammar forms that lasts over time (Spada and Lightbown, 2008) • there is no difference in results between integrating the teaching of rules with a communicative activity and teaching them separately (Spada and Tomita, 2010). In other words, presentation-practice-production works just as well as more integrated methods. there is theoretical support and hard evidence that teaching grammar rules, combined with communicative practice , is the best way for adults in classrooms to learn to use the grammar of their new language. Accuracy Fluency

Listening: a very different skill • Listening is not another kind of Reading • Listening is linear you can not look back at the text and re-read it! • Listening depends on understanding the sounds of English • Fluency development activities that teach understanding English at natural speed • Progressive practice in getting better at listening

The Navigate approach to teaching listening –psycholinguistic models -5 distinct operations • Decoding : matching the signals to the sound system of the language • Lexical search: matching groups of sounds to words in our oral vocabulary • Parsing: combining groups of words into grammatical units to obtain a simple point of information • Meaning construction: interpreting information in terms of context • Discourse construction : ideas and thoughts through chunks of language • Micro-skills in ‘unlock the code’ sections See John Field ‘Listening in the Language Classroom’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press http: //www. cambridge. org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/teacher-training-development-and-re search/listening-language-classroom-1/listening-language-classroom

Speaking: putting it all together • Comprehensible pronunciation • Appropriately polite language for a given situation • Tactics for holding the floor in a conversation • Fluency development • Building rapport • Meaning-focused output-speak in order to communicate meaning See Nation, I. S. P. , Newton, J. (2009) Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. London: Routledge

Reading: not just a guessing game • Typical courses test rather than teach • Explicit teaching sound-spelling relations • Teaching vocabulary • Speculating about syntax • Micro skills on reading ‘Unlock the code’ • Learn the most common and useful words • Awareness of vocabulary systems • Learning vocabulary rather than guessing • High –frequency grammatical features in nftural contexts

Writing for different purposes • The Navigate writing syllabus: genre approach-different types of texts learners will have to write • Drafting, discussing and re-drafting texts • ‘ Language for writing’